French Studies, Vol. LXVI, No. 2, 222 – 230
doi:10.1093/fs/knr267
ÉTAT PRÉSENT
WHAT HAPPENED TO THE CATHOLIC NOVEL?
TOBY GARFITT
MAGDALEN COLLEGE, OXFORD
The idea of a specifically Catholic novel arose during the nineteeth century. The
often anti-Catholic agenda of the philosophes and the libertine novel had been
counterbalanced by writers such as Rousseau and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre,
who sought to reveal God through the wonders of the natural world. But it was
Chateaubriand’s Atala (1801) that inaugurated the new genre of the Catholic
novel as a riposte to the dechristianization associated with the Revolution.
Chateaubriand was more partial to the epic, however, and in this he was followed by Bonald, who appreciated the scope that the epic afforded for the depiction of ‘le merveilleux chrétien’, including angels.1 An interesting
twentieth-century representative of this tradition is Patrice de La Tour du Pin,
whose three-volume Somme de poésie (1946 – 63) charts the progression from
lyrical poetry in a neo-Romantic vein, through a process of kenosis or selfemptying (which involves a shift towards prose in the second volume), to the
creation of a new théopoésie.2 Epic poetry continued to offer a means of exploring
religious and scientific ideas throughout the nineteenth century (Quinet, Hugo,
Bouilhet), but there was already a backlash by the 1820s, and, as the novel
rapidly established itself as the major literary genre, a number of Catholic subgenres developed. The ‘Avant-propos’ to Balzac’s Comédie humaine expresses nostalgia for the alliance of throne and altar, but only a handful of the novels — Le
Curé de village (1839), for example — promote a Catholic sensibility.
The new emphasis on the inner life encouraged by the violent upheavals of
the Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods, and in literature by Chateaubriand,
Constant, and the early Romantics, prepared the way for novelistic explorations
of struggles with faith and conscience in the manner of Sainte-Beuve’s Volupté
(1834); but for much of the century the growing confidence of the Church and
the spread of literacy were reflected in the huge production of anodyne ‘improving’ literature. The Catholic publishing house of Mame pioneered the ‘roman
évangélique’ with such works as Les Deux Lignes parallèles, ou Frère et sœur, roman
intime (1833) by Balzac’s friend and interpreter Félix Davin, and others by
women writers such as the comtesse de Bassanville (Anaı̈s Lebrun). Zénaı̈de
Fleuriot was to become particularly prolific, with eighty-three books to her name
(François Mauriac was later to remember both her and ‘Raoul de Navary’
See Déclin et confins de l’épopée au XIX e siècle, ed. by Saulo Neiva (Tübingen: Narr, 2008).
Patrice de La Tour du Pin, Une somme de poésie, 3 vols, rev. edn (Paris: Gallimard, 1981 –83). See
Marie-Josette Le Han, Patrice de La Tour du Pin: la quête d’une théopoésie (Paris: Champion, 1996); and Patrice de La
Tour du Pin: ‘La Quête de joie’ au cœur d’‘Une somme de poésie’. Actes du colloque au Collège de France, 25 –26 septembre
2003, ed. by Isabelle Renaud-Chamska (Geneva: Droz, 2005).
1
2
# The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for French Studies.
All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: [email protected]
ÉTAT PRÉSENT : WHAT HAPPENED TO THE CATHOLIC NOVEL?
223
(Eugénie-Caroline Saffray) as favourite authors of his childhood). Another was
the even more prolific Paul Féval, although his most famous novels, such as Le
Bossu, preceded his conversion in 1876. Alongside this bien-pensant current, the
violent fantasies of Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly — L’Ensorcelée (1854), Un prêtre marié
(1865) — provoked controversy and did not immediately attract imitators. A
few writers eventually emerged in the last quarter of the century who grappled
with the prima facie contradiction between the dominant doctrine of realism
and the spiritual claims of Christianity. Notable among them were the former
naturalist Joris-Karl Huysmans and Léon Bloy, both of whom emphasized the
redeeming power of suffering.
The best study of the relationship between the Catholic novel and the realist
tradition remains Malcolm Scott’s The Struggle for the Soul of the French Novel
(1989).3 Scott devotes five chapters (the bulk of his work) to the nineteenth
century: scepticism about religion, Barbey, the later Zola, Huysmans, and Bloy,
before moving into the twentieth century. He is particularly keen to scotch the
myth of Barbey as a reactionary and moralizing writer: for Scott, Barbey’s bridging of the space between fantasy and religion, his creation of character (notably
that of the country priest), his balanced articulation of moral conflicts, and his
complex narrative technique, all make him a worthy precursor of the twentiethcentury Catholic novelist. His significance is only now beginning to be recognized, however, and for Mauriac he was more important as a correspondent of
Maurice de Guérin than as a novelist. In any case, the SUDOC database contains no item relating to Barbey with the word ‘catholique’ in the title. In the
first years of the twentieth century the leading Catholic novelists were Paul
Bourget, for whom psychological analysis was more important than faith;
Maurice Barrès, for whom faith was indistinguishable from nationalism; and
René Bazin, who has been described as the novelist of the soil and the soul.
In 1922 Barrès published Un jardin sur l’Oronte, with its evocations of passionate love. The literary critic of La Croix, José Vincent, took violent exception to
what he saw as a morally dangerous work, and opinion was polarized. One of
those who supported Vincent was Henri Massis, pioneer of the ‘défense de
l’Occident’ against what he saw as foreign, ‘oriental’ influences. Albert
Thibaudet of the NRF was later to say that, if ‘la question du roman catholique
s’est trouvée à l’ordre du jour’, it was ‘à la suite d’un mouvement qui a commencé, je crois, avec la querelle du Jardin sur l’Oronte’.4 This was, of course, a
time of intense questioning as a result of the Great War, the growing popularity
of Nietzsche and Freud, the beginnings of modernism, and other factors,
including Gide’s lectures on Dostoevsky in 1921, in which he celebrated the
‘renversement des valeurs’ explored by the Russian novelist.
3
Malcolm Scott, The Struggle for the Soul of the French Novel: French Catholic and Realist Novelists, 1850 –1970
(London: Macmillan, 1989).
4
Albert Thibaudet, ‘Le Roman catholique’, in Réflexions sur le roman, 6th edn (Paris: Gallimard,
1938), pp. 221 –26 (p. 225).
224
TOBY GARFITT
The first brief studies of the Catholic novel appeared in the 1920s and were,
in the main, relatively hostile. José Vincent included a section on ‘le roman
catholique’ in his 1927 volume Propos un peu vifs, while abbé Louis Bethléem in
the tenth and eleventh editions of his frequently revised Romans à lire et romans à
proscrire (1928, 1932) pointed out various ways in which Mauriac failed to live up
to the ideal of a Catholic novel.5 But in the NRF of June 1926 Albert Thibaudet
devoted his regular ‘Réflexions sur la littérature’ to ‘le roman catholique’, focusing on the first novel by Georges Bernanos, Sous le soleil de Satan. He distinguished between ‘les écrivains de sensibilité catholique’ (represented, for
instance, by the early Mauriac), the ‘auteurs de roman à thèse’ such as Bourget,
and those who sought to portray ‘la vie catholique elle-même, vécue de l’intérieur, sentie dans ses exigences et ses profondeurs’, of whom Bernanos was a
fine example. The productions of the last group were the only ones worthy of
the label ‘le roman catholique’: a less ambitious work like Émile Baumann’s Job
le prédestiné (1922) should more properly be called a ‘roman chrétien’.6 Charles
Du Bos adopted a similarly nuanced approach in his groundbreaking François
Mauriac et le problème du romancier catholique.7 André Gide, in Les Faux-Monnayeurs
(1925), had shown Édouard noting in his diary that, while ‘le tragique moral’, as
made possible by Christianity, is the only subject that matters to him, ‘il n’y a
pas, à proprement parler, de romans chrétiens’.8 Mauriac’s early attempts to go
beyond a mere Catholic sensibility were famously derided by Roger Martin du
Gard in a letter of 1928: ‘Je rigole, mon cher Mauriac, je rigole quand on fait de
vous un écrivain du catholicisme! [. . .] Ce sont des livres à damner des saints!’9
It is true that in Le Fleuve de feu (1923) Mauriac had failed to integrate the
sensual and the Catholic elements of the novel, but as early as 1924 he had
announced to Frédéric Lefèvre that he was working on ways of using the novel
as an ‘apologie indirecte du christianisme’,10 and by the time of Martin du
Gard’s letter he was beginning to engage more authentically and productively
with both his faith and his inner demons. The golden age of the Catholic novel
had now begun.
There were surprisingly few major critical accounts of the genre in the 1930s
or 1940s, apart from that of Du Bos. Catholic critics continued to be wary:
Jacques Vier published a pamphlet in 1934 waspishly entitled François Mauriac,
romancier catholique?, and as late as 1957 Armand Müller wrote another called La
Question du roman catholique.11 Despite its similar title, Peter Hebblethwaite’s 1967
5
José Vincent, ‘Le Roman catholique’, in Propos un peu vifs: essais de critique ([Paris]: Éditions du monde
moderne, 1927); Louis Bethléem, Romans à lire et romans à proscrire: essai de classification au point de vue moral des principaux romans et romanciers (1800 –1928), 10th edn (Paris: Éditions de la Revue des lectures, 1928); Romans à lire [. . .]
(1800–1932), 11th edn (Paris: Éditions de la Revue des lectures, 1932).
6
Albert Thibaudet, ‘Réflexions sur la littérature: le roman catholique — chronique dramatique’, Nouvelle Revue
française, 153 (June 1926), 727 –34; repr. in Thibaudet, Réflexions sur le roman, p. 222.
7
Charles Du Bos, François Mauriac et le problème du romancier catholique (Paris: R.-A. Corrêa, 1933).
8
André Gide, Romans; récits et soties; œuvres lyriques ([Paris]: Gallimard, 1958), p. 1030.
9
Quoted in Jean Lacouture, François Mauriac (Paris: Seuil, 1980), p. 230.
10
Frédéric Lefèvre, Une heure avec . . . (première série) (Paris: Nouvelle Revue française, 1924), pp. 111 –19.
11
Jacques Vier, François Mauriac, romancier catholique? (Paris: Imprimerie de Tancrède, 1938); Armand Müller,
La Question du roman catholique (Paris: Procure de l’Assomption, 1957).
ÉTAT PRÉSENT : WHAT HAPPENED TO THE CATHOLIC NOVEL?
225
article ‘How Catholic is the Catholic Novel?’ adopted quite a different perspective, arguing that the modern Catholic novelist would have to abandon the ‘paradoxical and craggy’ orthodoxy of the older school and portray grace more as a
‘quality of human existence’ than as a dogmatic truth.12 Hebblethwaite was
dealing largely with anglophone writers, and his views had already been anticipated to some extent by Mauriac. More positive accounts of Mauriac came from
Pierre Letellier in 1944 and Georges Hourdin in 1945.13 A broader perspective
was offered by Joseph Majault (1946) and Nelly Cormeau (1951),14 and, of
course, Mauriac’s Nobel Prize in 1952 attracted new readers and critics.
In 1953 Charles Moeller published the first volume of his Littérature du XX e
siècle et christianisme, which included Bernanos and Julien Green but not Mauriac,
who had to wait for volume 6 (1993).15 The author was Belgian, and indeed
Bernanos initially attracted more serious critical attention outside France than
inside, with significant studies being published in Germany, Switzerland,
Norway, Britain, and the USA. Two volumes of the Lettres modernes Minard
series ‘Thèmes et mythes’, by Guy Gaucher and Michel Estève, were devoted to
Bernanos in the 1950s,16 and the important Études bernanosiennes series from the
same stable (associated with the Société des Amis de Georges Bernanos), in
which much of the best research has appeared over the years, was launched in
1960 (the most recent volume, 23, in 2004). The Mauriac series, in contrast, did
not begin until 1975 and has had only seven numbers; but it has been
amply complemented by the two series of Cahiers François Mauriac (1974 –91
and 1993– ), the Travaux du Centre d’études et de recherches sur François Mauriac
(1977 – 94), and the Cahiers de Malagar (1987 – 2001), mostly associated with the
Université de Bordeaux-3 and the team that has included Jacques Monférier,
Bernard Cocula, John Flower, and Paul Cooke. Julien Green’s novels did not
become recognizably Catholic until Moı̈ra (1950), and critics were slow to recognize the importance of that aspect of his wide-ranging output, especially since
Marc Eigeldinger’s Julien Green et la tentation de l’irréel, dealing with a different
aspect, had come out as recently as 1947.17 Samuel Stokes’s Julian Green and the
Thorn of Puritanism (1955) was an early example of anglophone and Protestant
interest in the writer.18 Peter Hoy’s pioneering 1970 bibliography of Green was
the complement to his Master’s thesis in the mid-1950s, another indication of
early anglophone interest.19
12
Peter Hebblethwaite, ‘How Catholic Is the Catholic Novel?’, Times Literary Supplement, 27 July 1967, p. 679.
Pierre Letellier, François Mauriac, romancier de la grâce (Uppsala: Lundequistska, 1944); Georges Hourdin,
Mauriac, romancier chrétien (Paris: Éditions du temps présent, 1945).
14
Joseph Majault, Mauriac et l’art du roman (Paris: Laffont, 1946); Nelly Cormeau, L’Art de François Mauriac
(Paris: Grasset, 1951).
15
Charles Moeller, Littérature du XX e siècle et christianisme, 6 vols (Tournai and Paris: Casterman, 1953 –93).
16
Guy Gaucher, Le Thème de la mort dans les romans de Georges Bernanos (Paris: Lettres modernes, 1955); Michel
Estève, Le Sens de l’amour dans les romans de Bernanos (Paris: Lettres modernes, 1959).
17
Marc Eigeldinger, Julien Green et la tentation de l’irréel (Paris: Éditions des Portes de France, 1947).
18
Samuel Stokes, Julian Green and the Thorn of Puritanism (New York: King’s Crown Press, 1955).
19
Peter C. Hoy, Julien Green: essai de bibliographie des études en langue française consacrées à Julien Green (1923 –1967)
(Paris: Lettres modernes, 1970).
13
226
TOBY GARFITT
Pierre-Henri Simon’s La Littérature du péché et de la grâce (1957) was instrumental in defining the canon and the scope of what came to be understood as the
modern French Catholic novel.20 By then the twelve-volume Fayard edition of
Mauriac’s Œuvres complètes (1950 – 56) had consecrated his work. Bernanos was
the first to have his novels collected in the Pléiade series, in a 1961 edition by
Albert Béguin, who had launched Bernanos studies with his Bernanos par lui-même
(1954).21 Green came next (1972 – 74), followed by Mauriac (1978 –85). The
Bernanos was a less good critical edition than the others: Michel Estève produced a revised and updated version in 1988, but a completely new edition is
needed, taking into account, for instance, the work by William Bush and Daniel
Pézeril on the genesis of Sous le soleil de Satan and Monsieur Ouine.22
Sartre’s essay ‘M. François Mauriac et la liberté’ (1939) argued that there was
a fundamental incompatibility between the necessary freedom of character in the
novel and the Catholic world view being put forward by the manipulative
author.23 Sartre himself was to find it less than straightforward to respect the
freedom of his own characters, and his polemical essay is not entirely disinterested, but the question of perceived incompatibility was to be central to the discussion of the Catholic novel over the next half century or so. Philip Stratford’s
Faith and Fiction (1964) offers a helpful discussion of the dilemma of the Catholic
novelist, while John Flower’s Intention and Achievement (1964) and Malcolm Scott’s
Struggle for the Soul of the French Novel (1989) both examine the relationship
between ideas and literary expression, finding varying degrees of successful integration.24 Albert Sonnenfeld and Ernest Beaumont disagreed in the late 1960s
over whether the silences and torn-out pages in Bernanos’s Journal d’un curé de
campagne should be interpreted in religious or psychological terms.25 Although
Bernanos studies continued to be dominated for a long time by the conservative
critic Michel Estève (who published Bernanos, un triple itinéraire in 1981,26 and
oversaw the revised Pléiade edition of the novels in 1988), it is now more
common for critics to challenge the traditional Catholic interpretation of a novel
like Nouvelle Histoire de Mouchette, as in Blandine Stefanson’s edition for Methuen
Twentieth-Century Texts (1982).27 Marie Gil has recently emphasized literary
20
Pierre-Henri Simon, La Littérature du péché et de la grâce: essai sur la constitution d’une littérature chrétienne depuis
1880 (Paris: Fayard, 1957).
21
Albert Béguin, Bernanos par lui-même (Paris: Seuil, 1954).
22
William Bush, Genèse et structures de ‘Sous le soleil de Satan’ d’après le manuscrit Bodmer: scrupules de Maritain et autocensure de Bernanos (Paris: Lettres modernes, 1988); Georges Bernanos, Cahiers de ‘Monsieur Ouine’, ed. by Daniel
Pezeril (Paris: Seuil, 1991).
23
Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘M. François Mauriac et la liberté’, Nouvelle Revue française, 305 (February 1939), 212 –32;
repr. in Situations, 1: essais critiques (Paris: Gallimard, 1947), pp. 36 –57.
24
Philip Stratford, Faith and Fiction: Creative Process in Green and Mauriac (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre
Dame Press, 1964); J. E. Flower, Intention and Achievement: An Essay on the Novels of François Mauriac (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1969); for Scott, see n. 3 above.
25
Albert Sonnenfeld, ‘The Catholic Novelist and the Supernatural’, French Studies, 22 (1968), 307 –19; Ernest
Beaumont, ‘The Supernatural in Dostoyevsky and Bernanos: A Reply to Professor Sonnenfeld’, French Studies,
23 (1969), 264 –72.
26
Michel Estève, Bernanos, un triple itinéraire (Paris: Hachette, 1981).
27
Georges Bernanos, Nouvelle Histoire de Mouchette, ed. by Blandine Stefanson (London: Methuen Educational,
1982).
ÉTAT PRÉSENT : WHAT HAPPENED TO THE CATHOLIC NOVEL?
227
creation rather than interpretation in her study of Bernanos’s novels in terms of
a palimpsest in which the ‘sous-texte biblique’ is constantly present.28 Susan
Suleiman, in Authoritarian Fictions, placed the Catholic novel within a wider tradition of ideological writing that used a range of techniques including exemplary
characters, while David Karnath was less accommodating, arguing in 1978 that
the Catholic novel was ‘a formal contradiction’, and in 2002 Margaret-Anne
Hutton took a similar hard line in relation to the work of Sylvie Germain.29
The obsession with whether or not a character achieves salvation, thematized
so painfully by Mauriac in Destins (1928), was already fading in the post-war
period as literary and sociopolitical questions came to dominate the critical
agenda. Bernanos and Mauriac were respected for their independent-minded
commentaries on contemporary issues, enabling them to be appreciated more
widely than simply as Catholic novelists. Bernanos died in 1948, and the posthumous publications edited by Béguin in the 1950s were essays (such as La Liberté,
pour quoi faire?, 1953). Mauriac seemed to have abandoned the novel, returning
to it only with L’Agneau in 1954. A new generation of Catholic novelists shifted
their attention to different issues, such as the worker-priest movement.30
Although the explosion of theses and monographs on Bernanos, Mauriac, and
Green was still to come, the creative climate had changed, and in hindsight the
heyday of the Catholic Novel was already over, with Green proving to be the
last major exponent of the genre (Chaque homme dans sa nuit, 1960; L’Autre,
1971).
In fact the critical studies of the 1960s, 70s and 80s were often concerned
either with a single theme (death, the priest-figure, sexuality, landscape, and
so on) or with a wider appreciation of the particular author’s literary qualities, in
which specifically Catholic elements were only one component; although a title
such as Monique Gosselin’s L’Écriture du surnaturel dans l’œuvre romanesque de
G. Bernanos was not untypical.31 Jean Touzot’s La Planète Mauriac, while certainly
seeking to ‘percer le secret de l’obsession planétaire’, has the broader aim of
‘faire mieux connaı̂tre un idiolecte’ through a systematic study of Mauriac’s
imagery.32 As late as 1995, though, John Flower could lament that the ‘industry’
of Mauriac criticism still ‘tended to follow fairly orthodox, even conservative
lines, not infrequently coloured by the shared Catholicism of the individual
critics’, a tendency that he sought to combat through bringing together a
28
Marie Gil, Les Deux Écritures: étude sur Bernanos (Paris: Cerf, 2008).
Susan Suleiman, Authoritarian Fictions: The Ideological Novel as a Literary Genre (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1983); David Karnath, ‘Bernanos, Green, and the Novel Convention’, Contemporary Literature,
19 (1978), 409 –28; Margaret-Anne Hutton, ‘Il n’y a pas de troisième voie: Sylvie Germain and the Generic
Problems of the Christian Novel’, in Women’s Writing in Contemporary France: New Writers, New Literatures in the
1990s, ed. by Gill Rye and Michael Worton (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), pp. 182 –94.
30
Gilbert Cesbron, Les Saints vont en enfer (Paris: Laffont, 1952).
31
Monique Gosselin, L’Écriture du surnaturel dans l’œuvre romanesque de G. Bernanos, 2 vols (doctoral thesis,
Université Paris-III, 1977; Lille: Atelier de reproduction des thèses, Université de Lille 3, 1979).
32
Jean Touzot, La Planète Mauriac: figure d’analogie et roman (Paris: Klincksieck, 1985).
29
228
TOBY GARFITT
number of articles of a different persuasion, inspired by Charles Mauron and
others, in the volume Psycholectures/Psychoreadings.33 At about the same time, attention began to shift away from the novels towards other types of writing, particularly autobiographical in the case of Mauriac and Green. After four volumes
of novels and plays, the fifth volume in the Pléiade Mauriac series in 1990 was
François Durand’s edition of the Œuvres autobiographiques, while Touzot’s new
five-volume edition of the Bloc-notes gave fresh prominence to his journalism.34
Edward Welch’s François Mauriac: The Making of an Intellectual (2006) was later to
use Bourdieu’s ideas of cultural production to explore topics such as Mauriac’s
commodification and packaging in Servan-Schreiber’s L’Express.35 Green’s reputation has never rested primarily on his novels, although they have been well
served by critics, notably the members of the Société Internationale d’Études
Greeniennes, including Michèle Raclot, Marie-Françoise Canérot (also a major
Mauriac critic), and Michael O’Dwyer, whose Julien Green: A Critical Study provides a helpful introductory survey.36 Green’s important and lengthy Journal was
what attracted attention, and it followed hard on the heels of the novels into the
Pléiade series (1976 – 77, with the later parts included in a miscellaneous volume
in 1990). Questions of the self have been an important strand in critical studies
of Green, from John Dunaway’s The Metamorphoses of the Self to Hélène Dottin’s
L’Écriture du moi dans l’œuvre romanesque de Julien Green and Carol Auroy’s Julien
Green: le miroir en éclats, and the Journal was the subject of a volume of conference
papers in 2005.37 The conflict between religious faith and (homo)sexuality has
been a particular focus for study in the case of Green, and more recently of
Mauriac.38
The most significant date in the later history of the Catholic novel, both as an
evolving genre and as an object of criticism, is no doubt 1962, when the Second
Vatican Council began its deliberations. By 1980 Bernard Bergonzi could write
that, since the old Catholic world view had collapsed and was now replaced by a
new ‘humanistic Catholicism’ that was less clearly at odds with the surrounding
culture, there was no room for the old-style Catholic novel, and the best that
could be hoped for was the ‘Catholic anti-novel’ of such as David Lodge.39
Patrick Sherry agreed that views of sin and society had changed irrevocably, but
33
J. E. Flower, ‘Introduction’, in François Mauriac: Psycholectures/Psychoreadings, ed. by J. E. Flower (Exeter:
University of Exeter Press; Bordeaux: Presses universitaires de Bordeaux, 1995), pp. 5 –7 (p. 5).
34
François Mauriac, Bloc-notes, ed. by Jean Touzot, 5 vols (Paris, Seuil, 1993). See Bernard Cocula, Mauriac, le
bloc-notes (Bordeaux: L’Esprit du temps, 1995).
35
Edward Welch, François Mauriac: The Making of an Intellectual (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006).
36
Michael O’Dwyer, Julien Green: A Critical Study (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1997).
37
John M. Dunaway, The Metamorphoses of the Self: The Mystic, the Sensualist, and the Artist in the Works of Julien
Green (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1978); Hélène Dottin, L’Écriture du moi dans l’œuvre romanesque de
Julien Green de 1947 à 1977 (doctoral thesis, Université de Paris X-Nanterre, 1997; Presses universitaires du
Septentrion, 1999); Carol Auroy, Julien Green: le miroir en éclats. Étude sur l’autobiographie (Paris: Cerf, 2000); Le
Journal de Julien Green: miroir d’une âme, miroir d’un siècle, ed. by Michael O’Dwyer, Michèle Raclot, and Peter
Collier (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2005).
38
See Jean-Luc Barré, François Mauriac: biographie intime, I : 1885 –1940 (Paris: Fayard, 2009).
39
Bernard Bergonzi, ‘A Conspicuous Absentee: The Decline and Fall of the Catholic Novel’, Encounter, 55
(1980), 44 –56; repr. in B. Bergonzi, The Myth of Modernism and Twentieth Century Literature (Brighton: Harvester,
1986), pp. 172 –85.
ÉTAT PRÉSENT : WHAT HAPPENED TO THE CATHOLIC NOVEL?
229
contended that ‘there still are distinctively Catholic novels, some of which reflect
the preoccupations of their predecessors, some do not’.40 While Mauriac is a
reference point for both critics, they are mainly concerned with nonfrancophone traditions (Sherry concentrates on Heinrich Böll and Flannery
O’Connor), but their analysis could equally well be applied to modern French
writers. In a paper read to the Belgian Royal Academy in 1992 Lucien Guissard
echoed Hebblethwaite in speaking of the necessary ‘apprentissage de la modestie
intellectuelle’ which recognizes that ‘Dieu retourne à l’indicible’.41 He instanced
Jean Sulivan, ‘qui se solidarisait avec les chrétiens de l’incertitude’, or the much
more affirmative Roger Bichelberger, whose faith is nevertheless neither triumphalist nor doctrinaire and who (though Guissard does not say so) is thoroughly post-Conciliar in his celebration of human love as a pointer to the
divine. Other writers Guissard mentions are Luc Estang, who turned away from
the Church; Jean Cayrol, who reacted against over-pious interpretations of his
earlier work and retained only ‘un implicite très lointain’; and those like Pierre
Moinot, Françoise Mallet-Joris, François Taillandier, or Joseph Majault, who
portray the search for meaning and a ‘vide qui n’est pas néant’. The novels of
Sylvie Germain, who was only just beginning to publish at the time of
Guissard’s paper, have displayed similar characteristics, but also a return to the
theme of evil (associated with Mauriac and Bernanos), combined with a notably
poetic style. Other writers who can be considered as in some sense the heirs of
the Catholic novel tradition include Michel del Castillo and Didier Decoin.
In the same year as Guissard’s paper, an article by Bernard Swift took a
similar line, but pointing out that Mauriac and Graham Greene had in fact
taken seriously Newman’s argument that there can be no such thing as a distinctively Christian literature, since all literature by definition expresses the
human condition in its sinfulness and need of grace.42 While deeply marked by
the Catholic Revival, they were in some ways precursors of the liberalizing spirit
of the Second Vatican Council, contributing to the development of what
Richard Griffiths called ‘un roman catholique plus vrai, où l’ambiguı̈té moderne
se substitue aux certitudes traditionnelles’.43 More recent authors referred to by
Swift in this connection are William Golding and David Lodge, and, in France,
Jean Sulivan, Roger Bichelberger, and Jacques de Bourbon-Busset (whose novels
celebrate his ‘amour fou durable’, and whose winning of the Grand Prix du
Roman of the Académie Française in 1957 for Le Silence et la joie started an association of that particular literary prize with novelists of a Catholic persuasion).
Olivier de Boisboissel and Rémi Soulié have suggested that the heirs of the
40
Patrick Sherry, ‘The End of the Catholic Novel?’, Literature & Theology, 9 (1995), pp. 165 –78 (p. 166).
Lucien Guissard, ‘Où en est le roman “catholique”?’, Bulletin de l’Académie royale de langue et de littérature françaises, 70 (1992), 42 –54 ,http://www.arllfb.be/ebibliotheque/communications/guissard110192.pdf. [accessed
31 October 2011].
42
Bernard C. Swift, ‘“The Dangerous Edge of Things”: Mauriac, Greene and the Idea of the Catholic
Novel’, Journal of European Studies, 22 (1992), 111 –26.
43
Richard Griffiths, ‘Du “roman catholique” traditionnel au roman mauriacien’, Cahiers François Mauriac, 11
(1984), 23 –39 (pp. 38 –39).
41
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TOBY GARFITT
Catholic novel are not all novelists and might include Bataille, whose
‘a-théologie’ is preoccupied with sin and guilt, Lacan, who acknowledged his
debt to St Thomas Aquinas, and Philippe Sollers, ‘dont le papisme allusivement
maistrien n’étonnera que ceux qui ne l’ont pas lu’.44
The distinction between Catholic and non-Catholic writers is not the only one
to have been eroded. Anglophone (including American) and francophone novelists with a Christian dimension are increasingly being seen once more as belonging to the same broad tradition. Swift emphasized the mutual admiration and
debt between Mauriac and Graham Greene, and Eamon Maher has drawn attention to the links between the Irish writer John Broderick and the French
Catholic novel.45 If Theodore Fraser offered a European conspectus in 1994
with The Modern Catholic Novel in Europe, he was only returning to the breadth of
vision of Donat O’Donnell (the pseudonym of Conor Cruise O’Brien) in his
Maria Cross: Imaginative Patterns in a Group of Modern Catholic Writers.46 Shusaku
Endo’s novel Silence was published in Japanese in 1966 and has been hailed as a
modern classic in the Catholic tradition; and among those normally categorized
as francophone writers, the philosopher-novelist Valentin-Yves Mudimbe (who
has published mostly in English since leaving Africa) has a strong claim to being
included in any study of the modern Catholic novel, for his Shaba deux.47
In The Pen and the Cross (2010) Richard Griffiths correctly emphasizes the
importance of the French experience of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries to the writing of Graham Greene and many others on this side of the
Channel, but he does not see more recent French writers and thinkers as
offering any pointers to a possible reinvention of the Catholic novel.48 One of
his central questions is whether Catholic literature can survive as theology
moves on, and it will be interesting to see whether the theologically informed
reflections of an influential philosopher like Jean-Luc Marion on love, idolatry,
and transcendence provide something for the next generation of novelists (in
whatever language) to get their teeth into.49
44
Olivier de Boisboissel and Rémi Soulié, ‘Les Romanciers et le catholicisme: une filiation littéraire’, in Les
Romanciers et le catholicisme, ed. by Claude Barthe (Versailles: Éditions de Paris, 2004), pp. 9 –26.
45
Eamon Maher, ‘John Broderick (1924 –89) and the French “roman catholique”’, in Reinventing Ireland through
a French Prism, ed. by E. Maher, Grace Neville, and Eugene O’Brien (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang,
2007), pp. 245 –61.
46
Theodore P. Fraser, The Modern Catholic Novel in Europe (New York: Twayne, 1994); Donat O’Donnell,
Maria Cross: Imaginative Patterns in a Group of Modern Catholic Writers (London: Chatto & Windus, 1952).
47
Valentin-Yves Mudimbe, Shaba deux: les carnets de mère Marie-Gertrude (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1989).
48
Richard Griffiths, The Pen and the Cross: Catholicism and English Literature, 1850 –2000 (London: Continuum,
2010).
49
Jean-Luc Marion: L’Idole et la distance: cinq études (Paris: Grasset, 1977), La Croisée du visible (Paris: Éditions de
la Différence, 1991), Le Phénomène érotique: six méditations (Paris: Grasset, 2003).